Noble effort

Noble, an Irish drama that tells the true story of children’s rights campaigner Christina Noble, offers two movies for the price of one, though the first succeeds far better than the second.

The film flashes back and forth between what could be viewed as the two halves of Noble’s life—her child- and girl-hood when she is a victim of evil and neglect and her empowered adulthood when she becomes a crusader on behalf of similar victims.

Noble’s early experiences are gut-wrenching to witness, though by all accounts the movie offers a restrained version of actual events. After her mother dies, 10-year-old Christina and her five siblings are left in the care of their father. Little time passes before his alcoholism leaves the family destitute and they are placed in “industrial schools.” Once she ages out of this system, Christina is left homeless. The streets bring perils both depressingly predictable—as when her vulnerable living situation makes her a target of rapists—and astonishingly unexpected—as when her baby is adopted without her consent.

The actresses playing both the child (Gloria Cramer Curtis) and twenty-something (Sarah Greene) Christina turn in phenomenal performances, capturing a sassy, optimistic spirit that give us hope she will find joy in the future even as she sustains a series of seemingly unending blows. This part of the movie is so strong, it holds up a lagging interwoven storyline where we see Christina embark on the work that has changed the lives of tens of thousands of Mongol and Vietnamese street kids.

What’s missing most from Noble’s middle-aged life in Ho Chi Minh city is an exploration of where her strength and determination spring from. We understand that her own painful childhood gives her a psychic bond to discarded and abused children. But empathy is one thing, the grueling, persistent, day-to-day work of battling endemic poverty another. A quick dream sequence suggests Noble’s Catholic faith may be her motivation, yet her interaction with God never goes much beyond some understandable railing. And with the exception of her very good works, Noble’s spiritual life disappears almost completely once she founds her charitable organization.

In fact, as played by veteran Irish actress Deirdre O’Cane, Noble is so resolved, so tenacious, so unrelentingly confident it’s hard to relate to her as anything other than a saint with a salty way of speaking (minimal profanity and realistic depictions of child sex trafficking account for the movie’s PG-13 rating). Surely in the early days of her ministry, the real Christina Noble had doubts about what she was doing. Surely she had dark, defeated moments where she questioned the viability of her goals. Yet the somewhat hagiographic narrative never betrays any hint of weakness. Seeing some chinks in Noble’s steely, crusading armor would have made her more relatable and her story all the more inspiring.

In like manner, we get the broad brush of how Noble’s philanthropy began, but we miss the details. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times from 1992, Noble recounted how, on her first trip to Ho Chi Minh City, she saw two little girls so hungry they were trying to catch and eat ants. The horrible specificity of this recollection points out what’s missing from the same scene in the movie, which simply shows the young sisters squatting in the dirt. It’s a generic image of exotic poverty, not much different from the footage playing in the background of a Feed the Children commercial. It can’t help but pack some emotional punch, but it lacks the authentic human connection it could have had.

Still, the fact that what we see of Noble’s story leaves us wishing we had more speaks to the effectiveness of the film. We walk away with plenty of questions about what’s going in Noble’s mind, but one clear conclusion—both halves of her life would and should make compelling movies in their own right.